When I put together a small comparison test of video services earlier this year, an overwhelming number of people got on me about not including Stage6, a side project of the people behind the popular DivX codec to showcase what their technology was capable of. Shortly thereafter, Stage6 shut its doors in a rather dramatic fashion--giving users mere days to find somewhere else to host their high-resolution videos.
That was in February though, and since then a group of half a dozen developers has put together their own solution, called Vreel. Originally planned to launch back in March, it opened up its doors this morning.
Like its predecessor, one of the service's strong suits is that it uses DivX, a codec that's not as popular as Adobe's Flash for Web video, but beat it to market for delivering high-resolution videos and is largely the format of choice for videos found on sites like The Pirate Bay. Since then, Flash has caught up technologically, but high-resolution videos have not quite reached the mainstream, only popping up on sites like Dailymotion, Vimeo, and in a gallery on Hulu. The user-uploaded videos already filling up Vreel's servers are beautiful (albeit mostly illegal).
The service is allowing users to upload gargantuan video files by most standards. The current cap is 1GB, which is what many free Web storage services offer as their entire limit. I'm told users will be able to upload even larger sizes in the future. The best thing is that there's no time limit, so as long as your video is under the size cap, it can be as long as you want. Considering the news about YouTube extending its video length, this is a necessary move.
The short clip I uploaded earlier today came from my digital camera and was converted from AVI to DivX with no noticeable loss in quality. The one caveat there is that, to see it, users have to install the DivX Web player in their browser, the same thing you have to do with Flash and YouTube. DivX's player, however, has a few tricks up its sleeve. For one, you can pop out any video to its original quality, which on some widescreen videos looks just great. It's also got a much more complex options menu for every clip that lets you do fast forward and rewind, and even save the clip if you have a premium version of the player--the same kind of things you get with Apple's QuickTime.
Unfortunately, the one thing missing is a way to embed the clip on other sites, so if you want to see how it looks beyond the screenshot below, you'll have to go here
Update: Oops, looks like we helped take the site down. Removing links for the time being--will put them back up when the site returns.
Update 2: Vreel is getting more servers and should be officially "re-launching" soon. We'll keep you posted.
Update 3: Everything is back to normal. Links are back.
High-quality videos on Vreel shine. You can even view them in close to native resolution with a pop-out player.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Divx's pet video hosting project Stage6 will be discontinuing operations Thursday, Feburary 28. The service let users put up their Divx-encoded videos and make them available in high quality for other users to watch and comment on. Already uploads have been discontinued, and the site will simply cease to exist on Thursday--taking all the user videos with it.
Tom Huntington, the Divx employee who posted the closure announcement on the company blog, wrote the service was simply costing the company too much money:
As Stage6 grew quickly and dramatically (accompanied by an explosion of other sites delivering high quality video), it became clear that operating the service as a part of the larger DivX business no longer made sense. We couldn't continue to run Stage6 and focus on our broader strategy to make it possible for anyone to enjoy high quality video on any device. So, in July of last year we announced that we were kicking off an effort to explore strategic alternatives for Stage6, which is a fancy way of saying we decided we would either have to sell it, spin it out into a private company or shut it down.
I won't (and can't, really) go into too much detail on those first two options other than to say that we tried really hard to find a way to keep Stage6 alive, either as its own private entity or by selling it to another company. Ultimately neither of those two scenarios was possible, and we made the hard decision to turn the lights off and cease operation of the service.
The blowback from users has been fairly substantial.
Since announcing the discontinuation of the service early this morning there are nearly 4,000 comments on the company blog. Most users are angered there's been such short notice. Others are simply mad there's not an option to take their videos elsewhere like what Yahoo did with its photo service last year.
I'm personally sad to see the site go. Stage6 was one of the first places I got to see what had happened to the Oakland, Calif., overpass that collapsed when a fuel truck exploded below it (news story). A user had uploaded an HD copy they had taken of the fire, and it was better and more accessible than some of the early news reports.
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